 Live from the Computer History Museum in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering OpenStack Silicon Valley 2016. Brought to you by Morantis. Now, here's your host, John Furrier. Hey, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Mountain View for OpenStack SV. This is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. This is our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier. I'm here with my next guest, Michael Miller, President of Strategy Alliance Marketing, Susie and Kermesh. Hey, Mirage. Hey, Mirage, okay. We got it. Vice President of Product Marketing at Morantis. And Morantis is the sponsor of theCUBE for the next two days. I want to first thank you guys for hosting us here at your events. We've been here every year. Thanks so much for your support. Allow us to extract the signal from the noise. Appreciate it. It's a pleasure. You guys are, we've got some news. Let's get right to the news. I have a lot of things to talk about, certainly with some of the deployment challenges out there and what's going on in the market. What's the news? So let's talk about what you guys have announced on stage today and get that out of the way. Sure. So, you know, just a few minutes ago on stage here at the event, Boris Rensky and I announced a partnership between SUSE and Morantis, by which SUSE is going to provide our enterprise Linux solutions to Morantis for their end customers. And we're also going to work together on making SUSE Linux Enterprise Server a development platform at Morantis so that we're mutually certifying and supporting one another. And then we're going to collaborate upstream and work on optimizing our joint technologies and really moving OpenStack forward for everybody. So how deep is the deal? I mean, obviously, you know, the younger generation doesn't know what a Barney deal is, but some people say, oh, some things are a Barney deal. We love each other. But the true test in this world of open source is how deep you guys are with technology. Can you share the deep depth of this? Yeah, sure. So one thing to keep in mind is Morantis is only an OpenStack. We focus on cloud, right? That's our kind of pure play focus, right? And we don't ship Linux distributions. That's not really our core. That's not something we do. And SUSE is a natural kind of partner to be that Linux kind of foundation for us. And having SUSE working with us, also working on the SUSE Linux as the platform for Linux running OpenStack, right? And also they have an extended offering called expanded support, which actually increases the footprint of Linux, including Red Hat as well as CentOS. You want to say a couple of words about that? Yeah. So obviously SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, we believe is the best enterprise Linux operating system for OpenStack, whether that's SUSE's OpenStack distribution or Morantis OpenStack distribution. And we believe that customers and our partners deserve choice and the freedom to choose at every level in the architecture. So for us, this partnership makes perfect sense. Choice is one thing, but what they really want is bulletproof, right? So that's, cause this seems like this is kind of where this is going. You want stability at the Linux level. A lot of stuff going on with the kernel. You don't want it to spend resource, let these guys decouple from your business, but they do it for you. They support you in an extended way. You then bring that to your customers. Am I getting that right? Yeah, so, and the other thing that Michael mentioned is about collaborating upstream to get Morantis OpenStack and SUSE Linux, working well together to your point is deeply integrated, working well together so our customers get that experience. So the complexity issue that we've been hearing, you guys have been harping on this for now for three years now since I've been hearing you guys talk about that. Morantis can be a one stop shop for the enterprise who doesn't want to have to deploy a ton of R&D bodies at doing OpenStack. They want to do enough smart resources, but they want to back up the Morantis truck, if you will, and bring some OpenStack. One number to call, right? And then we take on L1 and L2 support. So any cloud level issues come to us first. All right, so give us the update on that model. What is the current Morantis offering for that use case? Because that still is out there. I hear that all the time from customers. When you know who are out there, I've talked in the past. Look, I want OpenStack, I want an alternative and I want the software around it because I might have Azure and Amazon and some data center stuff, but I'm going to need to start positioning myself to have some proprietary or unique advantage in my data center or in the cloud. They want to get started. Take us through what you guys are offering that customer today. Again, we supply the distribution itself, the Morantis OpenStack software, right? And that's the support we provide. But we tout ourselves as the pure play company, right? So it's about, again, flexibility and choice for the customer. And if they want to go build something proprietary or hook on some storage devices or build their own networking on top of it, OpenStack is designed to be open and flexible and pluggable from the ground up. And we reflect that philosophy, right? The OpenStack community philosophy is what our philosophy is. And that's why we call it pure play, whether it is Linux distribution support underneath or different kinds of partner ecosystems that they want to plug in. All that is part of the ecosystem that we've been working on. Take us through some of the engagements you've had with your customers in their journey. Okay, they come in. They usually a phase approach, some pilots to move to production. Where are you guys now in your journey? Can you share some data around some anecdotal examples of a kind of pegged journey of your customers? Yeah, I mean, it usually starts with some sort of what we call ADAs. ADA is our assessment design architecture type of sessions, because every cloud is unique, even though we'd like to think otherwise. Every customer has their own unique business needs. They have their own products and services. They want to go to market in a different way. They have different security requirements. So we tend to sit down and work with the customer about what that is all about, right? So that's where the requirements come in. Then we have an implementation phase. Obviously we use Mirantis OpenStack software to go build that all out. I mean, there are lots of examples and public ones are AT&T and VW, are the two biggest customers that have deployed very large scale clouds using Mirantis as the expert, helping them through the journey. So think of this as a digital transformation for many of these companies. And they're moving down that path to more production. More production environments, more operationalizing of their clouds. That is still a challenge, right? Is bursting kind of like on the table? Is that in the conversation? Is that more of get management visibility first than figure out first? Get management visibility first. Get the private cloud up and running. Make sure it's successful. Make sure that you're able to demonstrate business outcomes with what you have now. Public cloud and bursting is really phased to, in my opinion, right? Yeah, automation's hard. It's coming. Automation, yeah absolutely. It's really hard to do automation. It's very hard to do automation. Mike, I want to get your thoughts. Obviously Linux is growing and changing, which is fantastic. It's made a lot of people money and certainly created a lot of great innovations around Linux. Certainly as Linux goes to the cloud, which everyone, it's there, you can't help but ignore Amazon's numbers for growth and performance. Azure's touting private cloud. VMware's out there. Google, I mean, everyone's out there. So the big guys are getting bigger and they have a lot of incumbent base to work from. So obviously Microsoft, they have that office base and they're going to try to stick some stuff into their stack. So it's very clear that every vendor has their own stack and different approach. What are you guys hearing? And what can you share to folks watching that kind of teases out the reality of the horses on the track, Amazon, Azure, and what's their approaches? What are some of the conversations in the community around this? Are people worried? Is it an opportunity? Is it hype? Is it real? Is it different? Where do you guys differentiate? I know it's a big question, but just share any color around the big guys. Well, from a SUSE point of view, it's an opportunity. So we partner very closely with AWS, with Azure, Google Cloud Compute, and literally dozens of other CSPs around the world because as you said, Linux is already in the public cloud and it is real. So there are enterprise customers all over all geographies that are embracing public cloud for the right types of use cases and workloads. And to us, it's becoming a real substantial part of our business. Is it interoperability a big part of that? I mean, when you talk about them in clouds, and so you see more and more deals like what you're doing with Mirantis, because in a way there is a need for standardization. That's what has been one of the problems we saw certainly in the Hadoop ecosystem. You know, the lack of standards has not only increased the TCO total cost of ownership, but created a huge complexity nightmare on barriers to industry to get a deployment up and running. Standardization is still an issue. It's still an obstacle. So I think there does need to be more standardization around APIs. There needs to be more standardization around management and security to really make that reality. Karmesh, talk about that, because you guys have solved that problem around, not solved it, but you've abstracted away some of the complexities around lowering the surface area for a customer to get into OpenStack. Yeah, I mean, think of OpenStack as this is sort of, the whole idea of OpenStack is this open API interface, right, to your point. It's all about how do I interact with this infrastructure in an automated way, in a scripted way so I can get infrastructure provisioning done faster. At the end of the day, who cares about infrastructure? Is infrastructure dead? It's a controversial topic, but there's a lot of innovation going on in infrastructure, but at the end of the day, from a business standpoint, how do I get value out of this? How do I get my developers productive? How do I get my applications out faster so I don't have to wait for my IT guys six weeks to go give me a server, right? I mean, we want to get away from that. And start all over again. That's a good point, as our Wikibon analysts say on our SiliconANGLE team, OpenStack should be invisible. That's a success point. Exactly. And then to your point about the skill set, making it invisible means it's basically an abstracted away to the developer. To the developer. The developer only sees the APIs. You know, I want a server, I want a network, I want storage, I want to stitch it all together. Give me, give it to me. Here's a single call and you're done, right? Well, I got to say, OpenStack, the community has zigged and zagged. I mean, how many times have we heard the death of OpenStack? Every year, OpenStack's struggling. It's probably healthier than ever now because the companies have zigged and zagged properly with the trends. But there's still a lot of stuff going on under the hood and at the SDN, you mentioned some of the work on the APIs. And certainly the business opportunities are great. We see that specifically. Can you guys share some areas that you see that are being worked on, you know, in the back room by all the developers and open source community here with an OpenStack? Is it the management piece? Is it the APIs? What some areas can you point to? So I think management and orchestration is a big topic. So I think I would say, and then right behind that is containerization. So one of the things that has, I think, made people hesitate to engage with OpenStack over the last year or so is uncertainty around where those technologies are going. And I think we're now starting to get together and align on some of those key technologies. We see some synergy around Kubernetes for orchestration is a great example of that. So I wrote a piece about that piece and the Stackernetys, Stackernetys has been a big popular term. What is that? What is it? Is it Docker and what is it? Kubernetes and Docker and OpenStack? So it's about day two operations. We talked about it earlier, in fact, on the keynote. So the issue with OpenStack, I wouldn't call it an issue, but it's matured to a point where the software works. But now the question is how do I kind of manage this and scale it and maintain it and operate it at hundreds and thousands of nodes? That's an unsolved problem still. So if I were to roll back or upgrade to a new version of OpenStack across a thousand nodes, and if I run into a problem, how do I roll that back and how do I monitor the whole environment? That is an area that orchestration, automation at that level. Now, Kubernetes, the good news about Kubernetes is that it solved that for containers. That's what it's very good at. So now you have a natural kind of fit between two different communities solving problems of each other. Orchestration problem, specifically. Orchestration problem, specifically, and also the whole life cycle management aspect, which is what Kubernetes is bringing to the table. That's great for OpenStack, and OpenStack, on the other hand, has done a great job bringing this community of vendors and technologies that work well, whether it's networking, storage, or compute, or all these different hypervisors, and that's something that Kubernetes doesn't have. So it's a great marriage of two great communities coming together and solving the problem. In my article I wrote, and also on Twitter, I was basically saying on the opening segment here, I said, OpenStack community has been a bunch about surviving. The whole group have been survivors, and that's because the community was kind of reset a few years ago, many years ago, and it was contribution-driven, very open-source-driven, and made great calls. So there's always, after Thrive, I mean, survive, there's always a Thrive period. So I see us kind of on that inflection point of not only surviving and being stable and healthy, but now thriving. What do you guys see as that thriving dynamic? What's going to make the OpenStack foundation and community and the ecosystem thrive to the next level? Well, I think part of it is going to be consensus around key technologies, like orchestration as an example. So a movement away from more and more fragmentation and a movement towards standardization around key APIs and key technologies. And I think you're starting to see that happen now. I think it's about business outcomes. I have a talk tomorrow, actually. We did a study with an independent third-party company to go talk to some super users at some of them are running 10,000 nodes. What is their success criteria? How did they go about doing that? And it turns out, and I won't spill all the beans, but you can come and attend our session. What time is the session tomorrow? It's at 2.10 in the afternoon. Will it be streamed live? I'm not sure. We'll check it out. We'll let the folks know. I mean, the key challenges we saw was great technology. These guys love to go put together a little POC or a pilot. They maybe have 100 nodes up and running, but then they have a challenge of expanding this further. Having more and more users and more and more tenants coming on board, scaling it, running it at scale, and getting some real business benefits out of it. That's kind of where the rubber meets the road. Great technology. All these standardization is coming together. Orchestration is coming together. But if it doesn't solve a business problem for a business and they're willing to invest more to expand, it's not going anywhere. I think that's a key cube gem sound by we have to make sure we grab that. I love that, Michael. I think your comment about the open APIs and some of the work under the hood combined with the business outcome really kind of validates the fact that no cloud's the same. Every company's not, there's no general purpose cloud. Yeah. Hybrid cloud is essentially a custom cloud. And that's what customers are doing. That's not necessarily products. It's what it is, right? It's a reality. It's a reality. And the use case drives it. Workloads drive it. I mean, we are seeing a lot of momentum in the telco space with all the NFE stuff going on. And they have specific requirements. They have specific performance requirements. They have specific scale requirements. Different world, right? And I love this mark. I mean, the cloud basically, I love the line I heard on the cube. I forget which event it was. The cloud is just the data center that nobody knows where it is. But this is back down to an open data center. Open cloud essentially brings that concept to life, which is just the data center. But it's all over the place. It's just distributed everywhere. All right, final thoughts here. I want to get you guys to comment on OpenStack Silicon Valley, this event. What's the big thrust? What do you see coming out of this? What are we going to see tomorrow? What's the big aha walk away bumper sticker? I think it's all about, you know, how do you containerize OpenStack and how do you solve the challenges of operations and life cycle management? And how do you bring the best of the two words together? Things that Kubernetes has solved, bringing it to the OpenStack community. Things that OpenStack has solved, bringing it to the Kubernetes community. And then, this is your cloud, right? At the end of the day, you want to be able to operate, deploy, manage, rollback, upgrade, and do that all seamlessly at scale. And at scale, I'm not talking 15 nodes or 100 nodes. I'm talking thousands of nodes. Yeah, company-wide. For a company-wide, you know, industry-wide, and Intel has always been touting these, you know, thousands of clouds for everyone, or cloud for everyone or whatever. I think this is the way to get there. Michael, your thoughts? So, I really liked what Jonathan Brice said this morning in the keynote about collaboration and interoperability and choice, because I think that's really what's necessary to drive the state of the art of OpenStack forward. And I think the Kubernetes collaboration that we've been talking about is a great example of that. But we also need standardization around things like rolling upgrades. We need real-world high availability and manageability to get to that day two scenario. And we're now at the point where we need to be well beyond the, I can give a good demo, and we need to get on to those real-world implementations. Well, congratulations on your announcement, building, having that foundational building blocks end-to-end solid bulletproof at the low level, certainly to enable that outcomes and work on some of the technical features. Michael, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. This is theCUBE live here in Silicon Valley for OpenStack SV, hashtag OpenStack SV or the rising hashtag OSSV16, which I think is the official hashtag. But either way, we're tracking it all. If you have any questions, ping us on Twitter on the hashtag or at theCUBE or at Furry. We haven't answered your questions or asked your questions. You're right, back with more live coverage after this short break.